The State Department senior official inferior only to Secretary of State John Kerry recently circulated a notice to employees regarding the government agency’s "challenges" surrounding conference room use.
The Washington Post reported that Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Heather Higginbottom sent the message to her colleagues this week in order to solicit responses to a survey that would "inform potential solutions" for such issues involving conference room use within the agency.
"To understand better the challenges staff experience finding, reserving, and using conference rooms for everything from large events to small meetings and to inform potential solutions to these challenges, I’d like to request that you fill out this brief survey," Higginbottom wrote.
Formerly a domestic policy aide to President Obama and the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Higginbottom suggested in the message that in order for State to develop "innovative solutions to complex challenges," it must have streamlined conference room use.
One anonymous State Department official express surprise that an individual of Higginbottom’s stature would directly focus on such an administrative issue.
"This used to be a GS-15 issue run by the guy in charge of the facilities management," the official said, indicating a civil servant fulfilling a supervisory position.
Nevertheless, a spokesman for the State Department insisted that it is not unusual for Higginbottom’s office to assume a role in department-wide projects, like that involving conference room use.
Meanwhile, the government agency faces challenges regarding Hillary Clinton’s use of private email, the Iran nuclear deal and selling the administration’s normalization of relations with Cuba, among other things.